Placher's Sam, one might suggest, died of inexorable physiological causes written into
the impersonal ordering of nature, ultimately by the Deity.
Spinoza merely secularized the God
of Aquinas and Calvin by equating him with the
impersonal, but equally static and equally timeless,
order of nature (Deus sive natura); and Laplace's «omniscient mind» is nothing but a secularized and depersonalized version
of the God
of the Scholastics and
of the Protestant Reformation.